Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Jeremy Blosser (emrys)" <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

(I'll restart this thread from the conversations that have been going on,
others can chime in with their comments.)

To summarize where we are...

0) quite a few people want to see us get off p4, for various reasons
   - license
   - lack of developer community familiarity
   - etc.

1) our p4 server continues to suffer from line problems
   - we have the option to host it on our existing server
   - but see (0)

2) Sorcery and Cauldron use bzr now
   - they like it
   - it is slower than we'd like (probably too slow for the Grimoire to
     use)
   - there is a new version coming out "soon" (maybe 1-2 weeks) that
     introduces a new network interchange format that should resolve the
     speed issues

3) other people have made cases for other SCMs
   - svk
   - git
   - svn
   - etc.

After some discussions on the list and IRC, consensus seems to be that we
should continue trying to find a p4 replacement *before* spending time
moving the server.  It's been proposed that the Grimoire team spend a month
or so trying out the top-running SCMs that have been proposed, putting a
section or two in each, with a volunteer doing the work for those
section(s) in that SCM.  At the end of that period the Grimoire Lead will
select *one* of those, and the entire grimoire will move to using the SCM
for a period of two months.  At the end of that period, we will either: 1)
switch the Grimoire to that SCM permanently, 2) try one of the other SCMs
for 2 months, or 3) move p4 to our server for now and set a future date
when we will try again.  If Grimoire *is* able to switch, Sorcery and
Cauldron can look at what they switch to and consider if it works for them
as well.  The goal would be to have all of our SCM system(s) entirely on
our server by August-September.

The hard part right now is figuring out that trial of several SCMs at once.
We will need volunteers and coordination.  We may or may not need to be
synching things back and forth to p4 during the trials, that's Arwed's
call.

Also, to compare apples to apples, for these trials at least we will be
moving away from the use of a dev/test/stable cycle to just having test as
the persistent trunk/head branch, with individual spells branched to
temporary dev branches as required.  Arwed and others have wanted to move
the Grimoire in that direction before, and it's really what the modern SCMs
prefer.

I will offer to get a central server on fawkes for each contender and
support is as well as I can for the initial trials.  Keep in mind these are
trials, so while I'm glad to eg get whatever web frontend is available
installed and set up, we may want to cut some corners initially just to
save time.  Whenever we pick something final we can polish it up more.
Also note that various SCMs take more or less effort to get installed; this
is the practical question of number of dependencies, so please just be
patient if necessary.  I'll delegate as much as I can to people that are
familiar with a system and want to help support it, but I also need to keep
familiarity with whatever is going on the box so I can continue to support
the box as a whole.

The current identified SCMs to try are git, svk, and svn.  git is most
similar to bzr (which the other teams are already using) and has a very
robust feature set.  svk is most similar to p4.  svn is probably in the
widest general community use.   Is this the right list?  Do we have some
volunteer gurus/sections for each?

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